Multicloud PowerStore provisioning with ServiceNow and Ansible

In today's article I wanted to introduce a video I have been working with some of my colleagues from the IaC Avengers team. We had done some work with Service Now before, in terms of custom catalogs and even approval workflows. You can refer to this article to see the details

What we had never done is to manage resources in more than one location. The Avengers team has a strong presence both in Australia and in Singapore, so we decided to create a solution such that from a single Service Now developer instance we could manage resources in both of our datacenters.

As explained in previous articles this requires the developer instance to be able to reach out the internal infrastructure. This can be potentially a tough task due to firewalls and other security measures standing on the way. For that purpose Service Now provide the Mid server. This is a very clever piece of software that will run on either Linux of Windows and allow Service Now outgoing API calls to reach your on-prem infrastructure.


For this setup we installed a Linux Mid server at one site and a Windows one at the other. Also, in one of the sites we had to configure the Mid server to work with a Proxy server, which we had never done and was a great learning experience

Like in previous projects we are implementing our automation using Ansible by means of playbooks that are stored in AWX. The API call from Service Now triggers a job template run.

So what are we automating? Well, since we had just launched the new PowerStore product and we had new toys in both datacenters, we said why not? At the end of the day, PowerStore has come out of the gate with the most comprehensive set of automation integrations of any product. Besides Ansible modules, PowerStore engineers can leverage the vRO plugin, the Kubernetes CSI driver, PowerShell and Python Libraries and the REST API which includes Swagger UI

I hope you enjoy the video

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